Koganecho Bazaar 2017's "Double Facade: Multiple Ways to Encounter the Other" show is a bit of a mess. As an annual art event that has been running in Yokohama's former red-light district for 10 years, using some of the former two-story brothels as studios and exhibition spaces, a feeling of scrappy, irreverent improvisation, however, is appropriate and can be considered one of the site's advantages.

The municipal authorities and local residents might not necessarily see it that way, though. The urban renewal project was meant to "clean up" the area visually and morally with art as a useful broom with which to, eventually, sweep away the area's history.

In the middle of various stakeholders' different objectives, the director of the Koganecho Bazaar project, Shingo Yamano, conceived this year's event around the social and cultural gap between the itinerate and changing community of artists-in-residence, and the local residents who are nominally meant to benefit from their work. With guest curator Kenji Kubota, this issue was expanded into a more general discussion of "otherness," in terms of addressing the growing intolerance and right-wing populism around the world.